


When I'm With You (i'm who i want to be)

by theappleppielifestyle



Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Captain America: The Winter Soldier Compliant, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-12
Updated: 2014-05-12
Packaged: 2018-01-24 12:58:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,292
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1606028
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theappleppielifestyle/pseuds/theappleppielifestyle
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><i>Threat,</i> his mind says, but Sam Wilson makes him feel the opposite a threat makes him feel, like he's safer than he has been in seventy years.</p>
            </blockquote>





	When I'm With You (i'm who i want to be)

At first, Sam is wary, which Bucky is comfortable with. He should be wary around Bucky, should have one hand on a gun at all times, just in case. But unlike most people who are wary of Bucky, Sam puts his hand out.

Bucky stares at it for a good while, trying to remember, and Sam says, "It's good to meet you, Bucky Barnes," completely without judgement, like Bucky isn't staring like a moron at his outstretched hand.

This only confuses Bucky further. It's never good to meet him, people meet him and start screaming, even though it won't do them any good, Bucky will walk at the same slow, even pace until he finds them. And he always finds them.

Bucky says, "You've met me," and Sam makes a face.

"I met the weapon they made," Sam says. "That wasn't Bucky Barnes."

The name fits, but it fits like a shirt that has gone into the washing machine for too long, one you have to struggle to get into now, and Bucky finds it tastes strange in his mouth:  _Bucky Barnes_ , an afterthought HYDRA never considered.

Finally, Bucky gets with the program and takes Sam's hand. It's a good handshake, Sam's hand firm and unyielding and full of callouses that come from working in the field, and Bucky finds he misses the warmth of it when Sam lets go.

 

 

 

Memories come back, but Bucky knows he'll never have all of them. There will always be things missing, inside jokes that Steve will say and then look at Bucky expectantly only for Bucky to shrug woodenly because he doesn't remember.

"Sorry," Bucky always says when this happens, and every damn time, Steve smiles and says, "'S okay, Buck."

It's strange, having people look at him without the fear in their eyes, the scream gathering in their throats. People still look at him like that now, but it's fleeting most of the time.

He remembers bits and pieces, Steve wire-thin and looking at Bucky over what they've scraped up for dinner, Steve plank-wide and shouting orders and chuckling when Bucky nudges him and whispers something in his ear.

He remembers Natasha, flecks of her, how she had looked at him with the same dead eyes he always saw when he passed a reflective surface. "We've met before," he says once, not a question, and she pauses where he had been typing out something into a search engine.

"It was a long time ago," she tells him, and leaves him to figure it out himself.

Bucky grips the counter for a long time after that, thinking of how she has two bullet scars from him now.

 

 

 

"Why do you trust me," Bucky asks before he can stop himself one day, interrupting Sam in the middle of his explanation about something called Star Wars.

Sam doesn't even pause. "You're Steve's friend. He trusts you, that's good enough for me, man."

He even claps Bucky on the shoulder, and Bucky forgets to flinch. He could take Sam down without any effort, he reminds himself.

"You're Steve's friend," Bucky says, eyes going over Sam's, a darker brown than his. Bucky always feels better after he examines the colour of Sam's eyes. "He trusts you."

"Guess I must be pretty awesome, then," Sam says, and he shoots Bucky a grin that makes Bucky's breath shrivel up.

 _Threat_ , his mind says.  _Threat_ , but Sam Wilson makes him feel the opposite a threat makes him feel, like he's safer than he has been in seventy years.

 

 

 

 

Bucky wakes up to the sound of something shifting, and lies still in bed, his hand curled around a gun he wouldn't need to take down whoever came into Steve's apartment.

"Just me," a voice calls down the hall, and Bucky's hand doesn't loosen. He slides out of bed, soundless as he makes his way through to the kitchen.

Sam Wilson gives him a two-fingered wave from where he's eating cereal, the kind Bucky doesn't like.

Bucky doesn't know how he feels about having preferences for things again.

"Hey, man," Sam says, his voice muffled through the cereal. He swallows, says, "How are you doing?"

"I'm fine," Bucky says, like he's said every time someone's asked. He sits down in a chair opposite Sam, who continues munching away like Bucky couldn't snap his neck in a second if he tried. Bucky analyses the man's weak points, and decides that yes, he could do it, he could do this if he wanted.

But Bucky doesn't want to, wants this man to keep breathing and telling him things and playing video games with him as long as Bucky can keep it that way, so he unclenches his metal fist and asks if there's any more cereal.

"How are you doing," Bucky asks once he's seated back down with his cereal. "It's three thirty in the morning, and you're in Steve's apartment eating breakfast."

"Not breakfast," Sam says, and has to swallow his mouthful. "Midnight snack." He pauses, and then says, "People like us, we have bad dreams, and not the kind you can just go straight back to sleep from."

Bucky nods, and his cereal explodes sugar across his tongue. He surprises himself when he asks, "If you don't- I mean, if you want to, you can tell me about it."

Not much can ruffle Sam, Bucky has learned. He goes with the flow of things. 

"I don't feel like it right now," Sam says, "but thank you, James."

Sam calls him James, like Natasha does. It makes something curl in Bucky's stomach, something not bad but not entirely pleasant, either.

"Don't mention it," Bucky says. 

He's been catching glimpses of his old self more often than usual, feelings that slip and fade as fast as they come, but as he sits and eats in the dark with Sam, the feeling sticks and stays.

 

 

 

 

Steve is around most of the time, checking on Bucky in a way that he denies being anxious. He leaves Bucky alone when he needs it, which Bucky supposes he should be thankful for.

Steve's showing Bucky photographs, black and white snapshots that Bucky half-remembers, and Bucky picks up a picture of a young Steve and Bucky.

"God, you were so skinny," Bucky says, and Steve laughs.

Bucky thumbs the edges of it. In the photo, they're both grinning, leaning out over a railing. Steve's mom took the photo, Bucky remembers. He remembers telling her to hurry up, remembers clutching the back of Steve's shirt in case he started to fall.

 _They have no idea_ , Bucky thinks. They're not strangers, the boys in the photo, not completely, and Bucky thinks he remembers being the boy on the left, the one grabbing the back of Steve's shirt.

"It's not fair."

Steve looks at him, and Bucky swallows bile. 

"It's not," Steve agrees, and lays a hand on Bucky's back. Bucky remembers the first time Steve had done that after the serum, after dragging Bucky out of a HYDRA facility, and remembers the bitter bile rising up his throat. Steve was never supposed to be a soldier, he should've been at home, safe and out of the way.

He remembers thinking,  _it's not fair_ , looking at his friend, the weapon the army made of him, and almost laughs at the irony.

He calls Sam later, answers Sam's, "Hey, James," with, "Hey," and then breathes down the phone fora while.

Sam waits, and Bucky dents the railing with his metal hand when he clenches around it. 

"Even the skyline looks different," Bucky says eventually.

Sam hums, is quiet for a second and then says, "Y'know, a lot of soldiers get a therapist after they come home."

"Can't you do it?" The idea of pouring his soul out to a stranger makes his skin crawl.

Sam's laugh is warm, just like the rest of him. "Therapists can't be your friends, and visa versa. Sorry, James."

"We're friends?"

"What do you think?"

Bucky pauses. The sun in his eyes makes him squint. He's never had many friends except for Steve, never needed anyone else but Steve, Steve was always enough for him. Still is, Bucky thinks, but it wouldn't- it wouldn't be bad, would it, having more people who give a shit if he dies tomorrow?

"Could you get me a therapist," he asks instead of answering, finding with muted horror that he trusts Sam to find him a good one.

 

 

 

 

Bucky adjusts. 

Therapy is like pulling teeth most of the time, but it actually helps a lot, and even though there are still times when Bucky goes out in public- not that he does it a lot, there are too many variables and everything is too loud and he could kill everyone if he wanted to but no-one acts appropriately afraid of him- and has to have a quiet panic attack in a public bathroom as he shakes off the urge to snap the necks of everyone around him, he's getting undeniably better.

He starts making more jokes, something Steve is delighted by, and he finds himself making them just to see Steve with that wide smile, light in his eyes that isn't there often enough.

Natasha spars with him, talking with him in Russian that matches his perfectly, and Bucky finally remembers the years they trained together, the missions, and one day he asks if he would prefer it if he called her 'Natalia,' like he did before.

Natasha would stumble, if she was the kind of person who stumbles.

"I'm Natasha now," is all she says, and Bucky nods and throws a punch.

 _I'm Bucky Barnes now,_  he thinks, and thinks it over and over, like a heartbeat, just as steady.

 

 

 

 

Sam cuts his hair when it starts getting long again, and Bucky says darkly, "I hope you know what it means, letting you near me with an electric razor."

"Can't do much damage with an electric razor," Sam says, then pauses. "You know, like, sixteen different ways to kill me with it, don't you? You do. Great. That's comforting, that's a great thing to know while I'm buzzing your hair, thank you."

"Just do it, Wilson," Bucky says, eyes on his reflection, watching the man in the mirror grin back at him.

 

 

 

It's familiar in a way it shouldn't be, how Steve looks at him with near-unbearable relief and love, different to how Natasha looks at him with with that carefully constructed expression that Bucky could dig through to get to the bottom of it, but doesn't really want to.

Bucky doesn't know how to quantify how Sam Wilson looks at him.

 

 

 

 

"How's therapy going," Sam asks, peeling off the sticker off a beer bottle and taking a sip.

Bucky shrugs. "Still would rather have you."

Sam glances at him at that. "It wouldn't work. Tried it before, it ended shittily. That's why they have rules."

"This century has a lot of them," Bucky says, and then clarifies: "Rules."

Sam snorts softly. "Don't I know it."

They drink in silence, alcohol that won't effect Bucky and will eventually make Sam giggle in between words, watching the sun set across Brooklyn.

 

 

 

Sex wasn't something he did when he was the Winter Soldier. 

Thank god. Bucky isn't sure how much more therapy he'd need if he started remembering things like that, going pliant under whatever instruction he received, even if it was 'spread your legs.'

He has memories of sex before, the first time when he was sixteen and nervous and in the back of the girl's car, the fifth time with a girl in the back of an alley, the twenty-third time with a man in a trench, the man ducking away when Bucky attempts to kiss him after.

Bucky Barnes, Bucky concludes, had a lot of sex back in the day.

He thinks about it, about going to a club and picking up a pretty skirt or maybe even a man who'll give him stubble burn, because that kind of thing is legal now. But there's something lacking, something big and glaring that has a lot to do with how Sam Wilson laughs at Bucky's jokes, or pinches the bridge of his nose when he's tired.

Bucky remembers ghosts of this feeling, but the next morning when Sam yawns a good morning at him and stretches, still bleary from sleep and bumping in the fridge when he tries to open it, Bucky is hit by the realization that no, it was never like this.

 

 

 

 

Bucky kisses Sam one day, when they're on the couch and playing video games.

Sam blinks, and on screen, both their characters die a bloody death as they forget to use the controls.

"Sorry," Bucky says, feeling himself blush- he never blushed, not for seventy years, and it's still weird for him. He never blushed much even before the war.

Sam puts a hand on his arm, the metal one, thumb rubbing the ragged line where skin blended to metal, and Bucky shivers.

"Are you?"

Bucky looks at him, at how Sam's gaze is steady but he's obviously nervous, his tongue flicking out over his bottom lip, a nervous tick Bucky recognizes.

"I," Bucky says, and he doesn't feel like he did just after Steve found him, like he was reeling and robotic and out of control, but he feels a different version of it, a more Bucky Barnes-ish feeling. "Are- are you sorry?"

Sam's throat clicks, and Bucky remembers that Sam isn't thrown by much, and Bucky has some effect on Sam that makes him fidget, makes him get nervous.

"I'm not sorry if you're not sorry," Sam says, and Bucky kisses him again as the screen blinks at them, asking them if they want to start over.

**Author's Note:**

> here's my [tumblr](http://theappleppielifestyle.tumblr.com/).


End file.
